But, in 2019, David Levy found the door relatively easy to push on.

The CEO of OpenAP, a consortium through which several broadcast companies are teaming to make it easier for advertisers to buy across their channels, was speaking with Beet.TV about a new initiative to enable direct campaign buying.

Under its first iteration, the two-year-old consortium is the means through which Fox, Viacom, NBC Universal and Univision have harmonized how they define audience segments that are used by ad buyers who want to buy across outlets.

Recently, OpenAP made a step-change – launching an actual marketplace through which ad buyers can purchase data-driven TV ads across those networks from OpenAP itself, or else through buying platforms with OpenAP integrations.

Speaking with Jon Watts, partner at TV industry consulting firm MTM, for Beet.TV, Levy describes the challenge of unifying the partners.

“It was a lot easier than most people think,” he says. “I think there is a common need now with Facebook and Google out there – I think most people feel like that is the real competitor.

“There’s actually been an incredible amount of collaboration, camaraderie amongst the table, so that actually has not been as bad as most people think.”

Earlier in October, OpenAP unveiled its marketplace plan, after two years in which its primary focus was creating a common taxonomy of characteristics used to buy advanced TV ads across the different partners’ properties.

“You can come in and say, ‘I want auto intenders and I have a million dollar budget, and here’s the campaign flights that I want’,” Levy adds. “And you can actually get one plan back across close to 50% of all the TV inventory, across linear and digital, in one plan.

“All you’re doing is going in and setting your audience and you’re getting back one campaign, instead of having to work with multiple networks. Instead of having to define your audience and onboard it across multiple networks, you just go into OpenAP, define it once and you can get your plan back.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat leadership event hosted Publicis Media in New York. The event and video series is sponsored by FreeWheel and LiveRamp. For more videos from the event, please visit this page. 

“There’s a lot of brands that are still getting their feet under them in terms of audiences and digital,” says Christine Grammier, managing director of LiveRamp, during the panel at the Beet Retreat in New York City hosted by Publicis Media.

Much of the challenge comes from gathering the proper data sets to be able to communicate trends to clients that reflect similar successes in traditional TV models.

“Trying to use the same data on the planning side and the measurement side is hard still,” says Brian Wallach, senior vice president and CRO of advanced TV at FreeWheel. “So even though we want to do this advanced targeting and we want to find the right people that are in the market for products and services, it’s still complicated, but we’re definitely making progress.”

While we may still be awaiting a full buy-in on advanced TV models across the industry, the reach of television continues to serve a crucial purpose for advertisers, which cannot be overlooked.

“We talk a lot about television and video and its ability now to be more targeted and more personalized,” says Neil Vendetti, president of investment at Zenith. “But I think if you take a step back, the vast majority of our clients still buy TV for largely the same reason they always have, which is maximizing reach. It’s still unparalleled in the marketplace in terms of its ability to do that.”

The reach itself, however, is a metric that needs to be reimagined in order to be fully maximized.

“If we’re going to transact on reach, it needs to be across any number of video touchpoints that a consumer would reasonably consider as television-esque,” says Vendetti. “It needs to be the same kind of an experience from an advertising and content standpoint so that we can reasonably expect the same level of effectiveness.”

All panelists are in agreement that now, more than ever, capitalizing on reach means first gaining a very specific and polished idea of what your target audience looks like.

“We really try to start the conversation with audience,” says Grammier. “And then your view on what does reaching them with a premium video impression really mean kind of pivots a little bit.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat leadership event hosted Publicis Media in New York. The event and video series is sponsored by FreeWheel and LiveRamp. For more videos from the event, please visit this page. 

But buyers need to be walked through the transition, and an ultimate conversion to 100% addressable may not be the end outcome regardless.

In a panel at Beet Retreat In The City, “What Programmers & Brands Want from Advanced TV”, three industry executives were asked why around 10% of national TV ad spend goes toward advanced TV targeting, rather than around 50%:

• A+E Networks – SVP, precision, Ethan Heftman
• LiveRamp – John Hoctor
• NBCUniversal – Dominick Vangeli

They were questioned by Janus Strategy & Insights president Howard Shimmel..

Transition is hard

A+E’s Heftman said: “The reality is, doing business outside of Nielsen age, gender demos is time consuming.”

NBCU’s Vangeli agreed: “The process of onboarding a first party data set … think about how much more complicated that is than transacting on adults (aged) 25 to 54.

“There’s a legacy business with decades and decades of a specific way to transact, and then all of a sudden all the viewership behaviour started to change and fragment.”

No race to bottom-funnel

Although connected TV and advanced targeting capabilities hold the potential to use attribution methods in order to offer performance-driven TV ads, A+E’s Heftman thinks assuming that will be the norm is a misconception.

“Sophisticated marketers at brands and at agencies have always known the value of television for upper funnel, awareness and consideration metrics,” he said. “And now we’re finally able to put lower funnel, foot traffic sales, those types of metrics against it.

“I think the fear of throwing the baby out with the bath water, the idea that we’re all just going to focus on the lower funnel value of television at the expense of the upper funnel… that’s really overblown because we’re all pretty sophisticated.”

Learn to love incomplete

LiveRamp’s Hoctor warned advertisers not to over-estimate the powers of the new medium.

“You have to go into the problem realising you’re never going to have all the data,” he said. “You have to know that out of the gate. Because you’re never going to know if your neighbour recommended the car, or something like that. That’s just not something that’s publicly available, or even privately available for you to do analytics against.

“We have to really calculate a baseline and what would have happened in the absence of the media that we’re measuring”

Context optimizes inventory

NBCU’s Vangeli detailed how NBCU is offering advertisers the ability to buy inventory adjacent to particular show moments, based on machine learning analysis of scripts and closed captions, plugged in to ad sales platforms.

“Let’s pretend a movie is starting to segue into a commercial break, and there’s a great scene where James Bond is shaving in the mirror,” he said. “And this is exactly something that we saw and we tested internally.

“Well then right after that, why is there not a Gillette ad or Dollar Shave Club ad? And so there’s a way to bring context at greater scale on a lot of the programming.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat leadership event hosted Publicis Media in New York. The event and video series is sponsored by FreeWheel and LiveRamp. For more videos from the event, please visit this page. 

That is the growing refrain from advocates of advanced television advertising techniques like addressable targetability and frequency capping.

They are witnessing a burgeoning set of technical capabilities, and a growing footprint of audiences with the devices to take advantage of them.

But now the industry needs to come together to counter what is a proliferation of such initiatives.

In this video interview during our Beet Retreat In The City event, David Clark, GM & EVP at FreeWheel, tells MTM partner Jon Watts how FreeWheel is seeking partnerships to do that…

Blockgraph for identity

Part of the commonality and interconnectedness that is required concerns identity – or rather, gaining an understanding of consumers’ real identity in a cross-device, post-cookie world, in a way that can be leveraged for TV ad buys.

Recently, Comcast-owned FreeWheel introduced Blockgraph, a new industry initiative focused on creating a more secure way to use data and share information. It is designed to become the “identity layer” for the TV industry, providing a platform on which media companies and publishers can offer marketers data capabilities without disclosing identifiable user data to third parties.

“If you’re a first party data holder, you want the ability to query everybody else’s first party data without having to expose your data to the outside world,” says Clark.

“It’s not just a technological problem. You want to have trust. So we created a thing called blockgraph.

“We’ve incubated it, we spent a lot of money on it… and invite the industry to participate in it. It’s self-funded but not-for-profit entity.

“If you want to join, you run your own node to the graph and, when your data gets queried, you get paid and, when you query other people’s data, you get paid and the match rates are exceptionally high. Then we open it up for all members also to build applications on top of that.”

Addressable scale required

Clark was speaking after Freewheel parent Comcast, Cox and Charter this summer launched On Addressability, a joint initiative to offer advertising customers targeted ads across the outlets.

“We wanted to pull the industry, the major industry, particularly MVPDs to start, to get alignment around how should programmers be enabled, what are the economics behind it, how should it be presented to the marketplace, how should people transact on these things?,” Clark explains.

“(We will) just start a dialogue on that. Not everybody’s going to agree on everything. There’s a recognition in the industry that, until a marketer can run a campaign on some meaningful percentage of American homes in addressable fashion – call it, 70%, just guessing – that the addressable market is not going to emerge.”

Standardization needed

“This year, the big thing we’re hearing from clients in the industry is, ‘We need you to connect us to each other and we need you to play a role, but not alone, in helping with a lot of the operational standards’,” says Clark.

“If you were to list out all the technical problems, the solutions to them are all known. I can probably point to some player in the industry that has solved it.

“The challenge where we are now, and different players are different states … Charter’s doing amazing things, Comcast’s doing amazing things, Dish is doing amazing things, AT&T, programmers, so on and so forth. The next phase is standardising all that.

“It’s just got to fill in the gaps, get it to connect and put the business standards on top. The measurement, the transaction types, remove the friction.

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat leadership event hosted Publicis Media in New York. The event and video series is sponsored by FreeWheel and LiveRamp. For more videos from the event, please visit this page. 

That is what a panel of industry executives gathered to discuss at Beet Retreat In The City:

• Amobee – Philip Smolin, chief strategy officer
• FreeWheel – Joy Baer, president, FreeWheel Advertisers
• ZenithOptimedia – Nick Hartofilis, EVP, national video activation

They were questioned by Jon Watts, partner at TV industry consulting firm MTM…

Zenith buyer bullish

Hartofilis said he doesn’t see the barriers to delivery that many industry executives often observe.

“Essentially, all the ingredients (to do that) are there,” he said. “We’re talking about data platforms, measurement, sciences, all those ingredients are there. It’s just a matter of having the right plan there to put it all to work. I’m actually in the stage now where I’m very bullish on a lot of this.”

Agencies stuck in Excel?

But that same optimism for and embrace of new converged buying techniques isn’t universal.

“The concepts of incremental reach and being able to really measure meaningful audiences outside of just (a) linear television buy, for example, is very real and moving in the right direction,” said FreeWheel’s Baer.

“But we still have a lot of clients who are working with Excel spreadsheets.”

Amobee’s Smolin echoed that sentiment. “There are definitely some leaders in the space and there are a lot of laggards in the space within kind of the agency ecosystem from our perspective,” he said.

TV effectiveness diminishing

Broader TV audience and economics shifts may prompt evolution of converged OTT and linear ad buying.

“TV does some things really, really well… But the economics are diminishing every year and with good reason,” Hartifilis said. “Our clients are under more pressure to want to bring those things and be able to prove the value of TV the same way as other mediums on the funnel.

“Every year we’re paying more (for ads) and we’re getting less. The relative advantage of TV in delivering immediate scale is still there and that’s why the TV upfront is still as robust as it is. But eventually we’ll come to a place where these things are going to have to come together and the supply space is going to have to expand.”

Play to medium’s strengths

FreeWheel’s Baer said, amid convergence, it is useful to think about the best and worst aspects of both digital and linear TV buying.

“Another ‘best’ in the digital space is around using data for targeting, measurement, attribution, things like that that digital does really well, that we still have a lot of opportunity to take advantage of in linear,” she said.

“The worst are things … like excessive tech and data fees that eat into working media budgets, the sort of creepiness factor of over personalization and being able to avoid things like that in this new world of converged television.

“With linear, it’s very important to preserve the things that are good and that work and then focusing on the things that work really well in digital around automation for example, really truly automating the entire buy, sell process is still elusive and we’re not all the way there.

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat leadership event hosted Publicis Media in New York. The event and video series is sponsored by FreeWheel and LiveRamp. For more videos from the event, please visit this page. 

“I think what we recognize is what the industry is dealing with right now, which is the very real divide still between understanding of and the skills associated with traditional linear broadcast and more sort of digital ways of thinking and behaving,” says O’Connell. “So for the sake of the research, we partnered.”

For Nail, who brings more of a traditional TV perspective, this means seeing where digital trends are pointing, and putting a sense of urgency on pulling away from what is comfortable for linear ad buys.

“Something had to be done to figure out how do we change what we’re doing so we can capture those opportunities to get our brands in front of those people,” says Nail. “But clearly it’s going to require pretty significant change in thinking about audiences, what data you use, and the technology platforms that are going to support that.”

O’Connell, whose work has been done mostly on the digital side, admits that there is much to be gained from exploring linear models of TV, but that digital people tended to be a little dismissive of, thinking that TV would look one very certain way in the future. Both analysts agree that there needs to be a happy medium that emphasizes the overlap between both models.

“We had a sea of what I’m now calling peaches and plums, which are really really different,” says O’Connell. “But the hybrid of the two is the beautiful nectarine.”

It’s these “nectarines”, O’Connell says, that will keep the industry evolving while still maintaining an organizational structure that can most effectively adapt.

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat leadership event hosted Publicis Media in New York. The event and video series is sponsored by FreeWheel and LiveRamp. For more videos from the event, please visit this page. 

That is why we have begun to see a range of collaborations, consortia and industry associations all come together, in pursuit of scale. It is the ultimate test of the “all boats will rise” idea.

In this panel discussion at Beet Retreat In The City, two such executives discussed how they are embarking on just such initiatives:

• OpenAP CEO David Levy – the Fox/Viacom/NBC Universal/Univision addressable ad data consortium has now launched a marketplace.
• Inscape sales and marketing SVP Jodie McAfee – the ad targeting unit of TV maker Vizio has launched a technology consortium, Project OAR.

They were interviewed by Janus Insights & Strategy president Howard Shimmel…

Project OAR starts paddling

Led by Inscape, which uses automated content recognition (ACR) in internet-connected Vizio TVs to understand what viewers are watching, Project OAR aims to define technical standards for TV programmers and platforms to deliver targeted advertising in linear and on-demand formats on smart TVs.

The founding members include Disney Media Networks (which includes ABC, ESPN and Freeform), Comcast’s FreeWheel and NBCUniversal, Discovery, CBS, AT&T’s Xandr and WarnerMedia’s Turner, Hearst Television and AMC Networks.

“The media landscape is littered with the dead carcasses of consortiums that have failed,” McAfee told Shimmel for Beet.TV. “We had seen previous attempts at trying to get to scale that really were, in our mind, rigid in that it was trying to force an entire industry into a single solution.

“The way to scale is flexibility and interoperability and the idea of building sort of a core building block.”

OAR trials early 2020

“Every one (of our members), over the course of the last … year and a half, has leaned in very hard. We get at least 25 to 30 participants in all of our meetings,” McAfee said.

“There are four big OEMs, we’re one, there are three others that shall remain nameless. We will probably be rolling out some trials at the first of the year. We think the next tipping point in terms of getting the other OEMs to join is when it’s real and so we’re sort of sitting back and not really pushing very hard on them.

“We will have a workable, a working product by the first of the year and when our members start pushing inventory through that product, the proof will be in that pudding.”

back when Canoe 1.0 launched, there wasn’t the existential threat of Facebook and Amazon and Netflix and Google. And so I think our members know that they have to work together in order to combat that.

Don’t go it alone

Such joined-up thinking is music to the ears of David Levy. The former Fox executive is now CEO of OpenAP, the two-year-old consortium involving Fox, Viacom, NBC Universal and Univision which harmonizes how they define audience segments that are used by ad buyers who want to buy across outlets.

Speaking on the panel, he recanted tales where going it alone didn’t pan out.

“Whether it was true[X] or Fox, every new thing that we did, regardless if it worked, if we were trying to just go up that hill on our own, it was difficult for agencies to invest a big amount to do something new, with just one of us,” he said.

“We’re now all compromising, small compromises, that basically mean we’re all pushing the same ball up the hill, we’re going to have success.

OpenAP befriends agencies

After its first phase of two years, now OpenAP recently launched its own marketplace from which to buy ads across the TV providers.

“A buyer can come define an audience once and actually get back a optimized plan across close to 20 networks, across linear and digital, all in one place,” Levy said.

Next up, Levy aims to get close to agency buyers.

“What we’re planning on rolling out this year is an agency council,” he said. “So we want to get a lot more feedback. A lot of the stuff we’re going to be focusing on is more on the measurement side of this year. So as we start to develop more standards, we’re going to really lean into our agency relationships.”

Respond to SVOD threat

“The bigger threat by far is the fact that you are going to have three new direct to consumer offerings, all ad free, coming into the market, all competing for consumers’ time and attention and for the ad supported television industry,” OpenAP’s Levy said.

“We better be ready to have a better consumer experience that will make sure we actually retain users.

“We’re all now investing in new ways to transact better, ways to reduce waste so we can get more relevant advertising in front of people. But that has to also result in a better consumer experience and likely reducing ads.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat leadership event hosted Publicis Media in New York. The event and video series is sponsored by FreeWheel and LiveRamp. For more videos from the event, please visit this page. 

According to Brian Wallach, svp and CRO of advanced TV at FreeWheel, which is owned by Comcast, local TV used to be the black sheep of the industry. That’s changed, as a more fractured market has made marketers reconsider how they reach the audiences they’re targeting. FreeWheel is working with MVPDs to aggregate their local inventories, as the most advanced part of the business is household addressable, where premiums are up to 15x the rate, Wallach told Beet.TV in an interview with Jim Nail, principal analyst at Forrester, at the Beet Retreat hosted by Publicis Media in New York.

“People are jumping in to buy the same local inventory, proudly to declare they’re using household addressable, and that local inventory went from, ‘Ick, ew, I don’t want to be next to that,’ to ‘Wow, this is really powerful inventory when you can understand you’re reaching the consumer,” says Wallach.

While national television is regularly upheld for its reach, providing fast access to a mass audience, local TV is more aligned with personalized targeting that marketers are increasingly looking to supplement their video advertising strategies with.

“Most people make decisions locally,” says Wallach. “It’s really high quality, valuable inventory.”

FreeWheel’s core role is to help marketers find audiences at scale across the different platforms and programming where they’re consuming content. The company makes it more efficient to find the right places to advertise across different networks and streaming services by modeling desired audiences and offering next-day reporting.

It’s a work in progress, says Wallach, trying to make the process of buying ads and targeting more customers more efficient. According to Wallach, it will be an industry-wide effort to get it right.

“I’m really excited about partnering across the industry in terms of data. We work with Vizio, and Inscape, to try to expand what that offering is and find real scale for these audiences really easily, that’s critical,” he says. “When you have great data and insights, and great supply, you can connect the dots and make an impact.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat leadership event hosted by Publicis Media in New York. The event and video series is sponsored by FreeWheel and LiveRamp. For more videos from the event, please visit this page. 

During a fireside chat with Jon Watts, co-founder and managing partner at MTM London at the Beet Retreat, hosted by Publicis Media, Whitesel explained why clients are “terrified” of current measurement strategies across linear TV, data-driven linear TV and advanced TV, mainly because multiple partners and approaches are required to get a clear picture of what’s driving results.

“We are in the Wild West. There are clients depending on the metrics and business goals. We could spend a day on TV measurement,” says Whitesel. “There’s a huge issue when it comes to TV measurement with a digital mindset, where people are like ‘Just give me exposure data and I’ll make decisions based on that.’ Thats a huge issue. If you do that you can run yourself right out of TV.”

Whitesel’s concern is that a singular view of data will mislead advertisers into ignoring some channels and spending more on others because of a lack of transparency across mediums. As advanced TV rises and linear TV changes, Whitesel is observing big shifts in the industry. Here are her biggest takeaways.

For advertisers, TV is a spectrum.

Whitesel says there’s still a misunderstanding about what advanced TV actually is – the conclusion is that it’s all OTT, CTV and one-to-one addressable TV. But there are more opportunities that get overlooked that fall between linear and hyper-targeted addressable TV, including data-driven linear, which helps brands make the most of big TV moments with the most reach, like the Super Bowl, while still collecting information on audience and lift.

“We have to understand that not all [channels] are equal across and they all contribute in different ways to different outcomes for brands and clients, and that’s the gap.”

Frequency remains the biggest issue for advanced TV.

Because transparency remains an issue for the advanced TV market, there’s a responsibility for agencies to improve the ability for clients to understand what they’re paying for and where it’s going, and tying that directly to business outcomes, whatever those may be. Those are going to be different for different companies, which is where multiple measurement partners come in.

“TV measurement is the great democratization we need to understand how each [of the channels] is tied to a business outcome at the client or brand level. Whether it’s retail store visits, website metrics, sales in aggregate – we need to get better about tying those things together, so we can deliver the right amount by channel for clients to deliver the best outcomes.”

Walled gardens come with both benefits and challenges.

Moving toward network and platform walled gardens, which Whitesel says some currently are but wouldn’t name names, would give advertisers more data and more transparency, because the data providers own the data. But that data comes at a cost.

“The cost is there of not seeing the rest of the universe, and there’s learnings where you’re not going to listen because you don’t have enough trust in the evaluation of the rest of the landscape,” says Whitesel. “What learnings can you get from the walled gardens without the cost of everything else?”

The next five years will be about content.

Whitesel’s prediction for the next five years in TV and advanced TV is that there will be a shift to control over content.

“There’s been a lot of disparate sources where you can buy audiences, through premium, TV-like content,” says Whitesel. “Now you’re starting to see the TV giants put their arms around that content, seeing how valuable it is and [wanting] better control of it regardless of where it’s being viewed. Owning that content and getting the exposure data is allowing for more insight.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat leadership event hosted Publicis Media in New York. The event and video series is sponsored by FreeWheel and LiveRamp. For more videos from the event, please visit this page. 

Now the business of marrying different consumer data sets is a big deal, and identity solutions are the glue that helps advertisers smartly target consumers across different media channels.

But one of the technology vendors helping enable that opportunity is having to counsel TV broadcasters how to shed concerns and embrace the future of audience-based ad buying.

In this video interview for Beet.TV, LiveRamp Video GM Allison Metcalfe explains what her company is doing to help.

“You have data tied to CTV IDs, you have data tied to a Comcast ID or a different kind of PII,” Metcalfe says. “We need to break down the silos, enable those data sets to be joined together, commingled for every use case that is possible.

“We have built a product specifically to help the sell side push audiences to their platform.”

The system is two-fold:

• An offline database that is rooted in Acxiom AbiliTec, the tool owned by LiveRamp’s former parent company.
• A match network where it appends devices and mobile IDs and now CTV IDs to its graph.

Such a combination could help broadcasters sell actual audiences, not just rough demographics, to advertisers.

But, speaking with Forrester principal analyst Joanna O’Connell during “The Scope of LiveRamp TV and the Promise of Convergence“, a chat at Beet Retreat In The City, Metcalfe said she has to encourage broadcasters to do so.

“The last great divide for us is working with the sell side to get them comfortable to enable us to give that information to the buy side,” she explains, saying many distributors grumble: ‘I don’t like the idea of people being able to, in essence, query my data’.

“I understand that,” Metcalfe says. “We actually have some headway. We’ve gotten a couple of agencies that are in a beta with our product working with certain publishers and MVPDs to give them access.”

Acxiom sold its own data warehouse business, the former LiveRamp, to InterPublic Group last year and kept the LiveRamp name for its remaining services.

The duo had already been helping companies meld audience data for digital ad buying strategies. Then it began looking at TV.

After Acxiom acquired LiveRamp back in 2014, the Acxiom TV team was combined with parts of LiveRamp, including combining Acixom’s programmer and MVPD relationships

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat leadership event hosted Publicis Media in New York. The event and video series is sponsored by FreeWheel and LiveRamp. For more videos from the event, please visit this page. 

So far in the rush to launch new paid streaming TV services, pundit opinion has focused on how providers’ library strengths and finite household capital will end up crowning a winning provider.

But Jim Nail doesn’t see things so black-and-white.

Rather than betting on Disney to kill off Netflix, as many sections of the tech press may depict it, the Forrester Research principal analyst is betting on a more mixed ecology emerging.

Streaming wars

“2020 is going to be such a fascinating year, because you’ve got Disney+ launching in a little over a week, November 1,” Nail says. “Hot on the heels of that, you’ve got Apple TV launching (and) HBO Max sometime after the first of the year.

“So far, we’ve kind of lived in a world where there’s Netflix and Hulu and for a long time it was like Netflix was all. You go back three years, people, they’d given up Hulu for dead. But Hulu came on, which to me says the consumers are understanding this world of streaming is not like a ‘one or the other’.”

Nail was talking with his colleague, Forrester principal analyst Joanna O’Connell, in this video interview for Beet.TV, at a time when TV has already been up-ended by the emergence of OTT players like Netflix.

But next year is when the game changes. Vertically-integrated SVOD offerings from content owners are causing many syndication rights with Netflix to time-out without renewal, as media companies look to distribute their own shows.

More nuance needed

“So now consumer has choice,” Nail says. “Netflix, Hulu, I haven’t even mentioned Amazon, and now Disney, HBO Max, Apple TV. Roku is building up a lot of providers on their platform.

“A lot of people are arguing about ‘will Disney kill off Netflix?’ or whatever. But I think they’re thinking about it wrong, because it’s really about ‘how will consumers make this choice of what is the right combination of these services for them?'”

In her interview with Nail, Forrester’s O’Connell also imagines that the classical subscription model may not be as locked-in as people think.

“Will you just subscribe to something in perpetuity or will there be models where you essentially can subscribe for a week to binge-watch the show you want or subscribe to the show and then walk away?,” she wonders.

M&A analysis

Nail also offered his insight on two just-inked deals in the connected TV advertising space.

AT&T’s Xandr buying Clypd, a sell-side platform for digital and linear TV ads:

“I think it’s a really interesting acquisition. Clearly it is going to give Xandr a lot of power to reach beyond just the Time Warner media assets that are within the AT&T family where they are now.”

Roku buying dataxu, a demand-side platform for connected TV ads:

“I see that as more of a straight technology purchase. Roku had cobbled together some internal technology that everybody I talked to said it was just terrible, really primitive. And rather than build on that or build something new, it was much smarter for Roku to buy it. They’ve got very ambitious plans for their advertising revenue stream and this I think will help accelerate them.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat leadership event hosted Publicis Media in New York. The event and video series is sponsored by FreeWheel and LiveRamp. For more videos from the event, please visit this page. 

Talking to Jon Watts, the co-founder and managing partner of MTM London at the Beet Retreat, a half-day Beet.TV event in New York hosted by Publicis Media, Vendetti says that while the TV industry has changed largely for the better over the last 10 years, it’s also become more challenging for advertising agencies to find and understand audiences.

“Our goal is to reach the right person with the right message at the right moment, and the fragmentation and diversification of television and video overall makes that a bigger challenge,” says Vendetti. But, the opportunity there is worth investing the time and money required to solve the fragmentation problem. “The ability to serve ads through digital platforms and personalize ads gives us the opportunity to be really effective.”

Zenith’s main goal is to drive value for clients as an agency, by helping them figure out where to invest their marketing dollars, drive business results and develop a process to be able to prove out what’s working and what’s not. But that’s the most difficult part right now, according to Vendetti. For instance, if Zenith guides clients to invest 60% of their marketing budget in linear TV, 30% of it in VOD and 10% in FEP, it’s hard to prove to clients that each investment had incremental impact on the bottom line. While linear TV still has the same benefit for advertisers that it always has – mass reach – being able to capitalize on that as well as more targeted, personalized mediums at the same time is difficult because of how quickly the industry has changed in some ways, and how little it’s changed in others.

Like Zenith Media’s evp of national video activation, Nicholas Hartofilis, also told Beet.TV, finding a solution is going to require a consolidated effort from the industry as a whole.

“Our systems have not evolved quickly enough to keep up with the way consumers are accessing content, and the way we need to be nimble and flexible for clients, so that friction is real,” says Vendetti. “It will take the entire industry coming together and figuring out better ways in order to reduce it. It needs to be prioritized.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat leadership event hosted by Publicis Media in New York. The event and video series is sponsored by FreeWheel and LiveRamp. For more videos from the event, please visit this page. 

But how that data comes in to execution varies.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, one vendor helping brands bring it to life for advanced TV ad buying explains the different levels of sophistication with which buyers are bringing audience data to bear.

LiveRamp TV managing director was speaking with Forrester principal analyst Jim Nail.

Brands

“The brands have the data or are close to acquiring the data. Collaboration across silos inside of the brands is really one thing we’re trying to help move more quickly. We’ve got six people on our team at LiveRamp that are really trying to make sure that the digital teams inside the brands are sitting with the TV teams inside the brands.”

Agencies

“The agencies, actually, are already moving more quickly in this way of trying to break down their silos. It’s an open door we’re pushing on – when we ask them to get in a room together, it’s usually not hard. So I really think we’re in that snow and that snowball is building. So we’re rolling downhill. It’s a really exciting time to just help nudge it along.”

Digital-style TV buying

Acxiom sold its own data warehouse business, the former LiveRamp, to InterPublic Group last year and kept the LiveRamp name for its remaining services.

The duo had already been helping companies meld audience data for digital ad buying strategies. Then it began looking at TV.

After Acxiom acquired LiveRamp back in 2014, the Acxiom TV team was combined with parts of LiveRamp, including combining Acixom’s programmer and MVPD relationships

“What we’re doing to bring all of these same opportunities in TV, not dissimilar to digital, to make sure that all of those TV IDs – whether it’s a Comcast ID or an Inscape ID or a DirecTV ID – bringing all of those IDs down to a common anonymous identifier,” says Grammier.

“(The aim is) to connect data sets together and help brands target their customers in a certain way on TV, help brands use third-party data in TV.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat leadership event hosted Publicis Media in New York. The event and video series is sponsored by FreeWheel and LiveRamp. For more videos from the event, please visit this page. 

In this video interview with Beet.TV, the CEO and co-founder of the TV advertising attribution vendor says, before its sale to LiveRamp earlier this year, the company was actually attempting a fundraising.

So, whilst LiveRamp is a friend with benefits for Data + Math, Hoctor views being part of the LiveRamp family as having funding for growth. Over the next year, he is planning two such growth points – first, becoming an automated currency for outcome-based ad guarantees and, second, international expansion.

“We really want to be viewed as a cross-screen currency that they can use to sell,” Hoctor tells Janus Strategy & Insights president Howard Shimmel for this Beet.TV interview. “The networks are doing more and more of this business, outcome-based guarantees. But, if you think about it, that’s more work than selling a Nielsen rating point. So the more we can automate it, make it easier, the more volume that they’ll drive.

“And then we’re definitely looking international to see where we could take Data + Math and launch it in other markets because the technology really can be applied to these other markets.”

A pixel for TV

Data + Math works when marketers add its “TV Pixel” to their websites or apps. The company links tracked in-app or on-web activity to ad exposure data from millions of US homes, effectively supporting attributing ad views to website or checkout conversion.

Wall Street Journal speculated that such marketing capabilities could be used in the 2020 US election cycle.

LiveRamp acquired Boston-based Data + Math, whose technology helps match up audience profiles and map ad exposure to conversion activities, after selling its former Acxiom Marketing Solutions (AMS) division to IPG for $2.3 billion.

Hoctor says Data + Math now benefits from LiveRam’s “identity” technology, which gains an understanding of consumer profiles in a fragmented world.

Crediting TV

For Hoctor, it’s all about helping TV prove its worth.

“I started Data + Math with my co-founder, Matt, with the thesis that TV was under-credited and, (therefore), undervalued,” he says.

“TV drives outcomes, but the fact that it’s separated from the purchase or that last click (means) credit is being gobbled up by the walled gardens and taken away from TV. I think a lot of advertisers would think of television as, ‘Oh, I do that for branding and then I do the other digital media for the outcomes, the final click’.

“The reality is, when you look at the data, you can see that TV will precede those clicks. If you see an ad six times on TV and then you do a Google search, shouldn’t TV be getting some credit?”

Driving outcomes

Hoctor lays out two examples of brands that can benefit from TV advertising that can demonstrate real outcomes:

• “If you are a mobile phone carrier, you’re trying to drive people to go to your website to sign up for a plan. Imagine measuring against that. You can do that. You can measure it and prove it to the marketer. They’ll gladly pay you to do that. That’s what they’re doing with the wall gardens.”
• “Or if you’re a quick serve restaurant, if you could really point to data that shows that running data-driven linear target at a particular audience will drive more people to go to your restaurant, they will pay you more money for it because they’re getting the outcomes that they want to get.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat leadership event hosted Publicis Media in New York. The event and video series is sponsored by FreeWheel and LiveRamp. For more videos from the event, please visit this page. 

That is the view according to one executive who sits at the nexus of TV, ad-tech and agency professionals.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Philip Smolin, chief strategy officer of Amobee, paints an optimistic picture of evolution.

“The really good news is we’re seeing, I think, across the board in the last six months or so, pretty recently, almost all of them leaning in more than you would’ve expected, on being able to do several things,” he says:

• “Use of data – working as really much more of a partner as opposed to just a vendor, a partner to the large agencies and being able to utilise a brand’s first party data.”
• “Being able to package that, so what they’re selling is not just linear or digital – it’s linear and digital as a function of that audience.”

Smolin was speaking with Jon Watts, partner at TV consulting firm MTM, for Beet.TV.

Amobee, whose TV initiatives took off thanks to its earlier acquisition of Videology Group, helps advertisers buy and sell across 30-second connected TV and other video inventory.

It is a media management software provider helping in the use of data for planning, transacting, measuring and analyzing ads across TV, digital and social.

Smolin describes how advertisers are now striving to plan and buy TV ads across both traditional linear and new OTT channels in a seamless way, one that takes advantage of features like:

• “The ability to utilise a brand’s first party data to understand definition of audience.”
• “It may be who are consumers who have visited a brand’s website, but did not actually convert.”
• “That conversion doesn’t necessarily mean a product purchase. It could be an insurance company and it’s for quotes or lead generation.”

He recognizes that this evolution is not a zero-sum game in which OTT providers will simply win out over linear – at least, not for all audiences.

“Addressable (TV)  is, I think projected, to go to about like 13 or 14%,” Smilin says. “CTV will be a full third of the industry. But the flip side of that is 50% or more is still going to be traditional linear.

“Younger audiences will skew more to CTV. But for most brands it’s about using a combination of them.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat leadership event hosted Publicis Media in New York. The event and video series is sponsored by FreeWheel and LiveRamp. For more videos from the event, please visit this page. 

“Have [advanced TV] be a complete choice in what targets we can apply, the ability to actually get to a point of true automation, going full end-to-end, and being able to do that at speed and scale. That’s not where we before,” Hartofilis tells Jon Watts, the co-founder and managing partner of MTM London at the Beet Retreat, a half-day Beet.TV event in New York hosted by Publicis Media.

Right now, these capabilities aren’t yet matured, except for data-driven linear, Hartofilis says, which has helped precision in planning and audience targeting and in getting more yield out of TV. “We just now need to get to that next phase, which is beyond planning,” says Hartofilis.

That’s where Zenith’s 2.0 phase comes in. After launching a precision TV service two years ago, returns have diminished as the industry has continued to evolve and the company is now expanding. “[We’re] getting to the point where with one lens you can see a much broader landscape, and starting to take it to the next level,” says Hartofilis. That includes a focus on convergence – taking areas where companies are spending a lot of money and bringing them together in order to make the most of those investments.

More convergence and collaboration will take shape in 2020, says Hartofilis, as companies leading transformation in the industry will need to work together instead of partake in a “data arms race.”

“There’s definitely an arms race – there’s a data arms race, an addressability hidden arms race going on right now and at the end of the day, we need to come together to be able to scale as all collective stakeholders to make sure that what we bring to market is right,” he says.

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat leadership event hosted Publicis Media in New York. The event and video series is sponsored by FreeWheel and LiveRamp. For more videos from the event, please visit this page. 

In this video interview with Beet.TV, MTM co-founder and partner Jon Watts says the new-wave US TV market is leading the way in new capabilities – but, often, companies are racing ahead on their own, making it more difficult for ad buyers to easily place their money.

“In Europe… they’re all grappling with the challenge of scale, or rather the lack of it and there’s a real thrust in the market at the moment towards collaboration, partnership, joint ventures,” says Watts, whose London-based MTM is a research and strategy consultancy for the TV business.

“(In the US), you have a lot of very large businesses doing exciting things, but in many cases they’re doing very different things. The buy side, when I spend time engaging with it, will talk endlessly about the friction of dealing with multiple MVPD footprints, scale platforms like Roku and Samsung – all of them are doing exciting things individually, but they’re not all doing the same thing.”

Watts’ comment echoes those from executives who say giving advertisers a way to enjoy new techniques like TV targeting and advanced ad frequency capping at scale is a key imperative.

FreeWheel’s Joy Baer recently told Beet.TV: “We’re not always playing on the same team or paddling in the same direction.”

For his part, Watts can see where joint working has to happen.

“Trying to plan and execute a campaign nationally at scale, if you want to focus in on addressable, involves dealing with a lot of intermediaries and parties, and trying to attribute value to that campaign in a joined-up consistent way remains profoundly challenging,” he says. And that’s before we start thinking about linear multi-platform or TV Everywhere and digital video.

“I sometimes think that Europe is like Switzerland; its very collaborative. America, I think, has lots of buckets of collaboration, but sometimes the industry is at risk of losing sight of the big picture.

“(Its about) ‘what should we be doing collectively as an industry?’ as opposed to in groups or consortia or small sort of pockets that are working very well, doing great stuff, but they’re doing different stuff.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat leadership event hosted Publicis Media in New York. The event and video series is sponsored by FreeWheel and LiveRamp. For more videos from the event, please visit this page. 

Case in point – the emerging world of connected TV offers huge potential for precision targeting, even marrying up that process with traditional linear TV buying.

One of the leading technology suppliers helping deliver that future acknowledges that there are too many vendors all trying to do the same – and that reaching the kind of scale to which traditional TV is accustomed will remain a challenge as long as self-interest stands in the way. She is urging them to start teaming up, so that advertisers can realize the kind of results they are looking for.

Come together

After more than 25 years in enterprise software and management consulting, Joy Baer, GM for FreeWheel Advertisers at Comcast-owned FreeWheel, says the new-wave TV ecosystem needs to come together.

“We’re not always playing on the same team or paddling in the same direction,” she says.

“What happens is an agency, or advertiser, or a broadcast company comes up with solutions that they initially want to determine … it’s their secret sauce. They want to think about how to best position that so it’s in their best interest first, and then the industry second.

“We have to find a way to meet in the middle on behalf of all of us.”

The scale challenge

What’s the problem created by this fragmented approach? More fragmentation.

“I think that the single largest challenge is scale,” says Baer, in this video interview with Beet.TV, referring to the potential advanced TV audience that could be reached if the separate islands of platforms were wired up to support straightforward converged TV ad buying, buying across a range of TV platforms.

“We need the broadcasters, for example, and cable operators and MVPDs to step in and make sure that their data and their inventory is consistent, and measurable, and we have a currency, and that they have systems that allow us to transact across screens, and that they’re investing in those things as well as the buy side so that the two can meet in the middle.

“It’s (about) making it possible to do it at scale, which television is the king of. That’s what we want to return to, and we’re bumping up against what I see as scale challenges. The reality is we’re not there yet.”

The push for unity

FreeWheel Advertisers is the product formerly badged “Strata“, a media-buying platform through which customers can see automated optimized TV schedules based on their audience goals, machine learning-driven ratings estimates and two-way price negotiation communication.

Prior to joining Strata, Baer was CEO of SpotBuySpot, purchased by Strata in 2007.

Baer is the latest to urge more interconnectedness for connected TV. Janus Strategy & Insights president Howard Shimmel recently urged the industry to be more collaborative. Forrester analyst Joanna O’Connell expressed concern over whether Roku’s acquisition of dataxu would lead to “higher walls” limiting converged buying. SpotX’s Sean Buckley and MTM’s Jon Watts have said that the US TV ecosystem, in particular, is too fragmented.

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat leadership event hosted Publicis Media in New York. The event and video series is sponsored by FreeWheel and LiveRamp. For more videos from the event, please visit this page. 

“It’s a hope,” he says. “I’ve always been surprised that the advertisers have not forced Facebook to be more collaborative. It’s really different to play in a planning space versus retain the necessary data to drive yield on an individual deal.

“I think it’s really important that every publisher realise you’ve got to play for planning, but … it’s not going to diminish your ability to actually use data to drive yield.”

Previously chief research officer at Turner, Shimmel left in 2018 to form his own consultancy.

He has previously published work showing how consumers are willing to give up more of their data than is commonly assumed.

But now Shimmel sees a problem.

“We, (in the industry), have is a big willingness to pay for currency transaction data, but no willingness to pay for great planning data sets,” he says. “If we’re ever going to get convergence right, there’s going to be this massive data set that is used just for planning.

“It links into Hulu’s inventory, it links into Roku’s inventory, it’s able to see what Ampersand has from cable addressable, and then it has linear on top of it, so it could actually then be used to plan effectively.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat leadership event hosted Publicis Media in New York. The event and video series is sponsored by FreeWheel and LiveRamp. For more videos from the event, please visit this page. 

Roku is the leading provider of add-on OTT devices, according to Strategy Analytics, and is also present natively inside many TV sets. In recent years, it has building on that footprint by branching out in to ad sales. Dataxu offers tools ad buyers use to find viewers on connected TV.

In Forrester’s Q3 New Wave report, Cross-Channel Video Advertising Platforms, published in August, the analyst firm gave dataxu a “differentiated” rating in five product categories.

So, what does Forrester principal analyst Joanna O’Connell think of the just-announced Roku deal?

In this video interview with her colleague, Forrester principal analyst Jim Nail, for Beet.TV, O’Connell says: “It gives (Roku) the opportunity to do all kinds of interesting things around audience extension and the like, which is evidently something that they’re interested in.

“For those two things to marry is really notable,” she says. “Makes sense for Roku, that’s a great thing for them to have. It’s going to shore up the technology that they don’t necessarily have, built in the way that the ecosystem would like them to.”

Roku holds first-party data on its users in unique identifiers it calls RIDAs, helping facilitate targeted advertising. Earlier this year, Adobe Ad Cloud began matching marketers’ own audience segments to RIDAs, meaning buyers who use Adobe as a demand-side platform (DSP) can now end up buying Roku ads more easily.

Roku also offers 15- and 30-second video commercials but also background wallpaper sponsorships, sponsored content hubs or advertiser-funded free movie nights.

Just over a year ago, Roku launched a marketplace where TV networks can sell their ads to target specific audiences.

Now O’Connell is pondering the market impact of Roku buying dataxu.

“What does it mean for buyers?,” she said. “That’s sort of a larger question. Does it limit their ability to get access to Roku and the variety of ways that they’ve gotten access to it before?

“Does it create some higher walls, where there were necessarily such high walls before? Does it complicate their ability to do the kind of truly converged, planning, buying and measurement that we’re interested in seeing?

“Remains to be seen. But that was my first thought.”

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat leadership event hosted Publicis Media in New York. The event and video series is sponsored by FreeWheel and LiveRamp. For more videos from the event, please visit this page. 

Myth 1: Advanced TV is addressable TV – if you don’t have a niche audience, it is not for you.
According to Metcalfe, this is false. “There’s an application of advanced TV for every brand out there,” she tells O’Connell. It starts with how companies define advanced TV: LiveRamp defines it as using data and automation to buy, sell, optimize or measure TV investment. Addressable TV is one component of that, but it’s not limited to addressable TV. New capabilities around data-driven linear TV have helped advertisers figure out how to address the right audiences in more traditional channels.

Myth 2: CTV is not resolvable to identity.
Connected TV is resolvable, says Metcalfe, and it’s an area where LiveRamp has been investing in the last two years. The company matches its network partners with connected TV IDs – essentially earmarking a household for audience targeting purposes – and is able to derive demographic data of consumers and the content they’re watching.

Myth 3: LiveRamp is only an identity graph.
This used to be true, but not anymore, says Metcalfe. While the identity graph is still LiveRamp’s core product, the company has evolved its offerings alongside the evolution of the industry. Today, it also offers a platform that matches the sell side to work with distribution clients directly, as well as a measurement platform and a platform for second-party data sharing and distribution.

Myth 4: Unduplicated reach and frequency is not possible.
This one’s complicated.

“Kinda true, kinda false,” says Metcalfe. “Technically, unduplicated reach is entirely possible. It’s more of an issue where the owners of the data are nervous and hesitant to give that type of information to the buy side.”

LiveRamp is working on a solution that involves building trust and collaboration between both sides of the fence that would encourage more data sharing, resulting in clearer reach measurement.

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat leadership event hosted Publicis Media in New York. The event and video series is sponsored by FreeWheel and LiveRamp. For more videos from the event, please visit this page. 

“Seven, nine years ago in digital, it was a wild wild west,” says Whitesel. “Everyone was running all these ad networks and DSPs and some people had DMP, some didn’t. The advertisers that were willing to take risks and understand that, yes, I may not understand what I’m buying right now but I need to jump in early and build learning and understanding … those are the advertisers that we’re seeing in TV that are also applying that same risk perspective.”

Whitesel notes that there is some discomfort in putting money, time and resources into methods that aren’t necessarily tried and true, but this is the thought leadership that can give companies the edge on competitors vying for the same viewers, content or ratings.

“I think you see some of our clients really setting themselves up within this Upfront to make those changes,” says Whitesel. “But it’s a three or four-year vision, and they know that it’s tiny twists of the knob each year as they can go and more forcibly ask for the things they want versus ‘I think I might want this, but I don’t know’.”

Looking ahead, Whitesel also mentioned the importance of networks viewing their specific services or focus within the greater media ecosystem, particularly as it pertains to the evolving world of advanced TV.

“What are the ways [companies] can control their content across an ecosystem to really deliver more for the advertisers as well as managing what they can control?” Whitesel says. “Even though they may not control every platform that it’s viewed on, they still have ownership over the content, which is a big piece of the pie.” 

This video was produced at the Beet Retreat leadership event hosted Publicis Media in New York. The event and video series is sponsored by FreeWheel and LiveRamp. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.   

In advance of the event, we interviewed one of the event’s keynote speakers, David Clark, GM & EVP at FreeWheel, a Comcast company.

“You’re starting to see technologies come online in that world that do look and behave more like digital,” says  Clark, in this video interview.

“Take just ad serving, for example. The concept of ad serving has never existed in linear television, that sophistication. It’s been more of a scheduling exercise.”

But companies like FreeWheel imbue their ad serving technology with awareness of TV schedules, allowing broadcasters to serve customized ads for play-out.

“That provides the publisher first with pretty meaningful improvements to their own yield, their own ability to use their inventory to drive more value for marketers.” Clark says.

This is the “first step” in connecting up linear and digital ad inventory, says Clark.

Household Addressability Is Happening

Clark says household-level addressability customized ads in linear schedules are finally real, after years of anticipation.

He was speaking after his Comcast, Cox and Charter this summer launched On Addressability, a joint initiative to offer advertising customers targeted ads across the outlets.

Speakers & Moderators on October 22, Hosted by Publicis Media:

To request an invitation, visit this page.

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